Many people use social networking sites to stay in touch with their friends, relatives, acquaintances, and others. An online social networking site (or simply a social networking site) is typically a server-based application, e.g., an Internet website. Users may connect to the social networking site using a client application, e.g., using an Internet browser, or other client application. Users may use the social networking sites via a client computing device, e.g., a mobile client computing device. Examples of client computing devices are personal computers, laptop computers, tablet computers, “smart phones,” etc. Examples of online social networking sites are Facebook®, Twitter®, etc.
Users may use social networking sites to post “updates,” personal information, business information, etc. Users may designate that the posted information is to be shared with a selected group of users. As an example, a user may indicate that personal information is to be shared only with friends, business information is to be shared only with business associates, and other information can be shared publicly. However, not all social networking websites provide features to accurately designate information to be shared. Moreover, users may share information using multiple social networking sites. In many cases, information posted to one social networking site may automatically also be posted to other social networking sites. As a result, users may inadvertently share information with people they did not intend to share the information with.
Information that users share on social networking sites are now used in ways that the users did not intend. As an example, prospective employers, educators, and others are able to view information that users have shared on social networking sites when such information is publicly available. Alternatively, information that a user intended to share with one group may accidentally be shared with a different group with which the user may not have intended to share the information—or even from whom the user may have even intended to hide the information. To determine which information has been shared with which groups of users, users may take various approaches.
A first approach is to ask other users, e.g., “friends” or other users belonging to specific identified groups, to log into the social networking site(s) and review what information is available to them from the user who shared the information. Another approach is to use various online reports that collect information from the various social networking sites. Such report generating websites typically require the user's login information so that the tools can log into the relevant social networking sites and retrieve the published information. However, users are often reticent to share their login information, e.g., especially with unknown or untrusted report generating tools.